Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“This Is My Last Election”

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Andrew Malcolm says that the president’s hot-mic gaffe yesterday feeds right into Romney’s campaign strategy:

A main strain of Romney’s assaults has been basically, Given the spending, chronic ineptness and apologies for America, can you imagine what Barack Obama would do in a second term unrestrained by any need to face voters ever again?

That’s an effective line because it leaves the worst things possible to voters’ imagination. And there is no response. What can Obama say, “My secret plans aren’t as bad as you think”?

What makes Obama’s Monday blunder so bad is that it doesn’t come from any sort of dismissable ignorance by someone who spent formative childhood years in Indonesia. It was clearly backstage conniving on Obama’s part and feeds directly into Romney’s ‘Can you imagine’ line.

Plus, it fits with the suspicions of millions that the community organizer has unspoken plans to take America in a transformative direction involving much more government. How else to explain his baldly touting more domestic energy while reducing federal drilling permits and torpedoing the Keystone pipeline?

The Etch-a-Sketch line by a Romney aide played into the meme that he might remake himself for the general election, something every successful primary candidate does to reach the broader audience necessary to win beyond one party. In 2008, the autumn Obama promising a centrist fiscal policy was a far cry from the spring primary fellow vying with Hillary Clinton for union support.

Now, Obama’s gaffe suggests to opponents their suspicions are credible about the Democrat’s hidden agenda that he sought secretly to discuss with the Russian.

But here’s something I haven’t seen anyone comment on — the title of this blog post. There are, after all, two possible interpretations of what he said. The conventional explanation is that he means that, since the Constitution as amended only allows two terms for a president, he won’t be running again. But considering his radical background, if one were of a conspiratorial bent, one would wonder if what he really meant was that after the next election, he’ll come up with some way to hold on to power indefinitely. Fortunately, given the attitude of much of the military toward him, a constitutional suspension is pretty unlikely, regardless of any interest he might have of being president for life.

[Update a while later]

Obama is enabling a return of the USSR. Well, again, given his red-diaper upbringing, that would make sense.

Business, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

A Culture Of Complacence And Incompetence

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Your tax dollars at work, to turn the nation’s capital into the third world:

“The odds of such a disparity occurring by chance are statistically infinitesimal,” Ronald A. Schmidt, a lawyer representing 12 white women exploring a class-action lawsuit, wrote in a 2003 letter. “There appears to be an entrenched network of African-American employees at WMATA that is able to steer jobs, promotion, training and other career enhancing benefit to persons of their own racial or ethnic group.”

I’m sure it’s just an appearance.

Health, Science And Society, Technology and Society

A Breakthrough?

1 Comment

A single anti-body that shrinks a wide variety of human tumors in mice.

They showed that nearly every human cancer cell they examined expressed CD47 — usually at higher levels (on average, about three times more) than did non-cancerous cells. Furthermore, people whose cancer cells express a lot of CD47 tend to have shorter life spans than people with similar cancers that express less CD47. This suggests that an analysis of the levels of CD47 expression in some types of tumors could be a valuable prognostic tool for patients and their doctors.

Willingham and Volkmer then implanted the different human tumor cells into matching locations in the bodies of mice — breast cancer tumors into the mammary fat pads, and ovarian cancer tumors into the abdomen, for example. Once the tumors were well-established (after two weeks or more), they treated the animals with the anti-CD47 antibody.

The researchers saw that most of the established tumors begin to shrink and even, in some cases, disappear within weeks of treatment with the antibody. In one case, antibody treatment cured five mice injected with the same human breast cancer cells. When the tumor was gone, the treatment was discontinued; the mice were monitored for four months with no signs of recurrence.

“These results indicate that anti-CD47 antibodies can dramatically inhibit the growth of human solid tumors by blocking the ability of CD47 to transmit the ‘don’t-eat-me’ signal to macrophages,” concluded the authors.

Clinical trials for humans within two years?

Faster, please.

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Science And Society

Bad Cholesterol

39 Comments

…is there no such thing?

I’m kind of amused by the commenter who fantasizes that he’s making some kind of point by claiming that “Eades is not a scientist.” What does he think a scientist is, or does?

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of nutritional science, this is junk nutritional science:

“Overall, we found that obese rats fed a high-fat, low-carb diet — comparable to that humans would consume — had larger, more damaging and deadly heart attacks than rats fed the control diet,” Lloyd says. “Our findings also suggest that, at the cellular level, a high-fat, low-carb diet impaired recovery of heart function in obese rats immediately following a heart attack.”

Only one problem. You can’t extrapolate dietary results for rats to humans. We have a different physiology and natural diet. Actually, there’s a lot of junk science based on rat research.

[Update a while later]

Link was missing. Fixed now.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!